Participatory Historical Memory Mapping with the Community 

Objective and Outcome

To introduce participatory resource mapping techniques to help students to cultivate the ability to facilitate community driven site-analysis. This can help students acknowledge the necessity to consult communities on knowledge of their lived context for meaningful implementation of architectural endeavours.

Requirements/Prerequisites

• A well established relationship with the community (pick a community you have visited before and have a well established rapport with), ideally in collaboration with the social organization already working with the community,
• presence of community members from different age groups, charts, sketch pens, locally available material for mapping.

Procedure

Step 1 : Organize a community gathering of different age groups to have an interactive group discussion on mapping the past 

Step 2: Students welcome the community and explain the purpose of the exercise to the community

Step 3: Students draw a timeline indicating different years with a time span of 10 years (eg. 1990-2000-2010-2020) 

Step 3: Students hand over the sketch pen/chalk powder to community members.

Step 4 : Students ask community members to map the following sequentially 

1. Number of people and houses 
2. type of house structures (eg. mud walled, tin roofed, temporary, etc) 
3. memories of what different seasons were like for eg. intensity of summers, intensity or scarcity of rains and severity of winters (students can support community members time and again, but need to facilitate discussions in a manner that enables the community own and drive the mapping process) 
4. Greenery or trees back then
5. Natural calamities mapping eg. water clogging, flooding, droughts, heat stress, intense winds, etc.
6. Water and Sanitation infrastructure
7. Other miscellaneous stories of their lifestyles

Step 5: Students have a discussion with community members to understand how they have been adapting to the changing  community, structural attributes and weather conditions during summer over the years. 

Step 6: Students thank the community, click photographs of the timeline and let the community keep the timeline (It is always recommended to keep material developed through community driven exercises with the community)

References

None

Source of Idea